[Note:  The following segments were interspersed with stories and other activities, and so do not necessarily provide a single, coherent narrative.]

Raising Questions:

     Awe is a vital dimension of life, but one that is often ignored in our day.  Without awe and wonder, life becomes flat and people become hollow.  Science reveals a world filled with mystery and wonder.  Mystery is simply truth bigger than us and our capacity to understand.  Mystery is not a problem or riddle to be solved.  With mystery, the more we learn, the more we realize how much more there is that we don’t know.  Mystery inspires awe, which invites us to enter into mystery and celebrate the wonder that is all around us.
     One of my personal heroes personal heroes, Albert Einstein, known primarily for his scientific accomplishments wrote the following as part of his credo, or statement of beliefs:

The most beautiful and deepest experience a [person] can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as of all serious endeavor in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness.  (Albert Einstein, “My Credo”)

     We come together this morning to explore the place of mystery, wonder, and awe in our experience of life.  The sense of mystery and wonder arises from a fundamental feature of human nature: curiosity.  It seems that we were born to ask questions in a never-ending quest for understanding.
 

Seeking Answers and Understanding:

     Questions, questions, questions.  We have so many questions. From the time we first begin speaking as a young toddler, all the way to our deathbed, we keep asking in one way or another, “What’s it all about?”  In our earliest years, parents and other adults are able to answer many of our questions.  But certainly not all of them.  Then we go off to school to learn the answers to a whole bunch more questions.

     But we learn more than just the answers to questions.  We also learn how to look for our own answers through study, research, and scientific method.  We learn how to ask questions clearly and then design experiments to help answer them.  Those methods have worked quite well through the centuries, giving us theories that explain much of what happens in the world, and giving us technologies that add comfort, convenience and enjoyment (and occasionally aggravation) to life.

     But there’s a surprising thing about science.  And that is, the more we learn about things, the more we realize we don’t know.  For every questions we answer, five or ten more pop up.  There have been times in history when at least some people truly believed that we were within a few years of knowing everything.  But here we are, still trying to figure it out.  From Albert Einstein again:
 

    The important thing is not to stop questioning.  Curiosity has its own reason for existing.  One cannot help but be in awe when [contemplating] the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality.  It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day.

     Even the great mind of Einstein realized that only a small part of the mysteries of the world can be unraveled.  And beyond that, the only appropriate response is awe.

     So science can’t answer all of our questions.  One of the questions that many people wonder about, and that science doesn’t know how to answer, is “How did the universe begin, and where did it come from?”  People have wondered about that probably as long as there have been people.  But if science can’t find the answer, what are we to do?  We could just say, “Oh well, we don’t know, and we never will, so let’s not worry about it.”

     But another way is to look somewhere else besides science, for instance to our imagination.  If we can’t find the real, true story, perhaps we can make up a story that feels right enough to satisfy our curiosity.  And people have done exactly that for thousands of years.  And those stories are called myths.  In particular, stories meant to answer the question about how the universe began are called creation myths.

     The purpose of a myth is to explain something.  No attempt is made in a myth to prove the truth of its story to us.  In fact, it’s often pretty obvious that the story couldn’t be true in any literal sense.  But there are often deeper truths about the world, and about ourselves, that come through the stories.

     Virginia Hamilton, who writes much about mythology, says “Myths were created by people who sensed the wonder and the glory of the universe.  Lonely as they were, by themselves, early people looked inside themselves and expressed a longing to discover, to explain who they were, why they were, and from what and where they came.  We read and enjoy these stories [today] for their poetic beauty and the wondrous vision of the people who created them.”

Resting in Mystery:

     Many of the questions aroused by our curiosity may be answered by exploration and research and study.  Science can give us equations and formulas that seem to explain many of the mysteries of life.  But you know what?  As I said earlier, every answer that science gives us generates another whole list of questions.  And while science and experiments can answer many of the “how” and “what” questions, they really don’t do such a great job with the “why” questions.

     Why are we here?  Why is there something rather than nothing?  Why do we have to suffer and die?  Why are there not answers to all of our questions?  I can’t answer any of those questions.  But that’s okay.  I think life is probably much more interesting that way.  How boring would it be not to have anything to wonder about?

      Ric Masten, a Unitarian Universalist poet and song writer, wrote a poem about this once.  It’s called “A Magician,” and part of it goes like this:

hey
how do you do that?
this
after my Uncle Jimmy
made a penny disappear
then smiling slyly found it again
in my ear

now to a seven year old
this is the stuff of which
the meaning of life is made
and I begged him to reveal the mystery
and teach me to do it
and when he did I could see
there wasn’t much to it
except practice
and the fact that through it
I became the undisputed star
of the second grade
which was all right
but making the magic
is never as much fun
as watching it being made.

     I’m not suggesting that we never try to figure anything out.  Our natural curiosity would never allow that.  But what I am suggesting is that the presence of unanswered mysteries need not be a source of dismay.  Indeed it can be a source of delight, of a never-ending sense of wonder, even awe, at the strange, complex, sometimes bizarre world that we live in.

     When you visit someplace like the Grand Canyon and experience its grandeur; or when you live through a raging storm with terrifying thunder and lightning; or when you witness the miracle of childbirth;  the wonder and awe of it all may be enough.  That is life at its purest.  Direct experience without the need of questions and answers.

     Someone once said that fundamentalists are people who have lost their sense of wonder, the essential hallmark of our species and the central feature of the human spirit.  You know, I think having all the answers really wouldn’t be very much fun.  And besides, thinking we have all the answers doesn’t make it so.  As H. L. Mencken once said, “Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable.  But there it sits, nevertheless, calmly licking its chops.”

     And it’s not only the big, sensational questions about life and death and their meaning that can inspire wonder and awe.  In his book, Apology for Wonder, Sam Keen writes the following:
 

A mature sense of wonder does not need the constant titillation of the sensational to keep it alive.  It is most often called forth by a confrontation with the mysterious depth of meaning at the heart of the familiar…  Rare birds – the scarlet tanagers and indigo bunting of experience – do upon occasion delight us, but a mature sense of wonder may be evoked by starlings and English sparrows.  One is reminded of the incident in Zorba the Greek when Zorba and the boss meet a peasant riding on a donkey.

 “One day, I remember, when we were making our way to the village, we met a little old man astride a mule.  Zorba opened his eyes wide as he looked at the beast.  And his look was so intense that the peasant cried out in terror:
 ‘For God’s sake, brother, don’t give him the evil eye!’  And he crossed himself.  I turned to Zorba.
 ‘What did you do to the old chap to make him cry out like that?’ I asked him.
 ‘Me?  What d’ you think I did?  I was looking at his mule, that’s all!  Didn’t it strike you, boss?’
 ‘What?’
 ‘Well . . . that there are such things as mules in this world!”

 A mule, a tiny seed, a child, a seashell, a smile, a hug – these too are worthy of wonder and awe. The Rev. Tom Owen-Towle writes:
 

 We were born in mystery, live in the midst of it and will return to it upon our death.  Blessed be mystery!
 Even if future generations solve problem after problem, ethical and political as well as personal ones, there will remain unfathomable mysteries, things we humans can neither understand nor unravel.
 Our job, while on earth is to plunge into mysteries: open ourselves to their perplexity and promise.  Engage life, meet death, surrender to love, wrestle with evil.

 So I ask you this morning, what do you find mysterious, wonderful, awesome in life?  What are the strange, marvelous things in your world that turn your head, startle your heart, lift your spirit?  Please take a few moments in silence to reflect on those questions.